Qld Astrofest Honoured Guest 2009

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What is expanding space?  What came before the big bang?  What causes the expansion?  What expands?  Is there an edge to space?  Beef up your cocktail party conversation repertoire by hearing about these and other baffling cosmological conundrums, such as how the expansion can exceed the speed of light without violating relativity, and where the energy goes when photons are redshifted by the expansion of the universe. 

You may also get to hear about Dr Davis' team's measurement of time-dilation in the distant universe that was listed amongst Nature's "Research Highlights" in August last year.  

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Dr Davis specializes in interpreting astrophysical data in terms of their implications for fundamental physics. She completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales in 2004, and received the award for the best Science PhD submitted at UNSW that year.  She then worked at the ANU’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, helping design a space telescope for NASA, before moving to Denmark to join the Dark Cosmology Centre.  In 2008 she returned to Australia and is currently a research fellow at the University of Queensland, working with the Australian-led WiggleZ dark energy survey, while maintaining a part-time Associate Professor position at the University of Copenhagen.

Dr Davis is the author of "Misconceptions about the Big Bang" (Scientific American, March 2005) and can be caught making semi-frequent media appearances about astronomy.  She's also played Ultimate frisbee for Australia and won a sports scholarship and University Sporting Blue while doing her PhD.